Edward Leigh’s meeting with Hungary’s far-right PM is part of a wider pattern – let’s not be naive about what is going on
The Conservative MP Sir Edward Leigh earlier this month tweeted a picture of him and his colleagues Christopher Chope and Ian Liddell-Grainger – all of them ERG members who drove the Brexit agenda – standing beside Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, at a gathering in Budapest. The tweet celebrated the trio “learning about his country’s effective ways of combating illegal migration”.
Their presence in Budapest, for a conference of parliamentarians from allied hard-right political parties across Europe, could easily be dismissed as fluff. But the spectacle highlights both troubling connections between Britain and Hungary’s governing parties and the wishful thinking of UK Conservatives looking to Orbán‘s Fidesz party for inspiration.
